What has us so fired up to return to strategic dismemberment duty? Legitimately freaky sounding two-player co-op action.

Imagine walking down a spooky hall with your pal when he suddenly begins acting like a crazy person, fighting enemies only he can see. Meanwhile, you’re left to face the sudden arrival of a very real horde of blood-hungry necromorphs. His space dementia ends up creating tension between players, cleverly replicating the relationship between the game’s characters.

Or at least that’s the idea. We can’t wait to see if it really works.

Mr. Papoutsis, who also serves as executive producer of the Dead Space series, was eager to share other details, too. Speaking with us by telephone from his Redwood City office, he waxed philosophical on the challenges peculiar to interactive horror, dished that simply killing the series’ new human enemies won’t be enough to keep them down, and explained why some games just demand mutant babies.

Post Arcade: So how crazy is Isaac Clarke? After the trippy ending of the first game, I’m tempted to think everything that happened in the second was just some wild hallucination.

Steve Papoutsis: [Laughs] Isaac’s been through a lot.

There were the events of Dead Space, seeing what happened to his girlfriend and the crew of the USG Ishimura, and discovering these things called necromorphs. Then he was incarcerated at the beginning of Dead Space 2, where he had people poking around in his brain for codes. He definitely suffered.

But as he progressed through Dead Space 2 he kind of turned the corner from being a victim at the start of the game to going more on the offensive as he tried to take down [the villainous] Tiedemann.

Dead Space 3 takes place about two months after Dead Space 2. In that game — spoiler — he and companion Ellie Langford destroy a civilian space station called The Sprawl. So he’s actually kind of laying low. He’s just trying to avoid society. He’s found his way to the New Horizons Lunar Colony, and he’s just trying to stay under the radar. He’s got all his faculties and is put together mentally. He’s just looking for an escape from everything that’s happened in the past.

PA: Can you tell me a little about John Carver, Dead Space 3’s new co-op partner character?

SP: He’s an all-new character in the Dead Space universe. He’s a sergeant by trade, so he’s a soldier. He’s got a family. In our graphic novel that releases soon you get a lot of back story for Carver. Some incidents with his family have thrust him into a shell that he’ll be coming out of through the game. Just like any good character, he needs to have strengths, weaknesses, flaws. He has a journey he goes through over the course of the game.

PA: Isaac Clarke’s name was obviously a combination of the names of a pair of seminal sci-fi writers. Was there some similar inspiration for John Carver’s name? Or is it just that he’s quite good at carving up necromorphs?

SP: Way, way back when we first started playing around with him we were calling him Cooper, which was kind of an inside joke. “Coop,” the shorthand of his name, stood for co-op. So we were toying with that name for a while.

But no, his name had nothing to do with dismembering. It was just a cool, interesting name.

Also, there was apparently a famous pilgrim named John Carver, who we discovered after the fact. He was a New World colonist, a passenger on the Mayflower, which was an interesting coincidence.

PA:Dead Space has earned praise for being truly, legitimately chilling. What’s the secret to giving gamers the creeps? What’s the difference between making a scary film or writing a scary book and making a scary game?

SP: Good question. The biggest difference in creating horror and tension in a video game is that in film and books there’s a linear perspective. With a film you see what the director wants you to see and only what the director wants you to see. It allows you to be more heavy-handed with the action, the suspense, the thrills or the terror or tension that you’re trying to deliver.

It’s more difficult in games because the player could be anywhere at any given time. When we try to orchestrate a memorable scare moment, it’s possible for the player to be looking at the floor or in the middle of combat, and not looking where we want them to be looking.

So, what we need to do is drive the story and the player forward to a point or moment where we can show them what we want them to see. Moving them to certain positions within the game requires a lot of careful planning and telegraphing.

What allows us to get away with some pretty good scares is the fact that you, the player, are so immersed controlling everything that you wind up getting sucked into the experience and let your guard down a bit. This is opposed to a film or book, where things are crescendoing to a point where the director is going to hit you with something that’s orchestrated in such a way that you might expect something is going to happen. In a video game, because you’re controlling so many of the elements, you’re a little bit more exposed.

PA: How does co-op affect the spooky vibe? Some people have wondered whether playing with two players play will tone down the fear factor.

SP: When we decided we were going to bring co-op to the franchise, there were a couple of things we knew we needed to maintain. One of them was single player. The way that Dead Space has felt from the first to the second game carries over to Dead Space 3. You’re playing as Isaac, and it’s that same sense of isolation you would expect from a Dead Space single-player game. It was important for us to retain that.

Introducing co-op required us to do it in a way that felt authentic and very Dead Space. We didn’t want to change our story because of the second player, we wanted the co-op to feel additive to the story.

That’s why we made it drop-in/drop-out. Players can come and go as they please. They can join a game in progress. If I’m half way through, you can still join me. We don’t have to start over or create a different save file. If you get a bunch of gear while you’re playing with me and loot for the weapon crafting system, that comes and goes with you. So you can go back and play single-player by yourself, gear up, and come back and join a co-op game with your friend. You won’t be penalized. You’ll keep all of your stuff.

But the secret trick to making our co-op stand out and be very Dead Space is that we’re bringing more of a psychological horror angle to it. As you play through co-op with a friend you’ll get to see additional missions that only appear in co-op. Those missions bring context to John Carver’s journey, to things that he’s personally going through. We’ve created these moments in co-op where one person will be seeing something totally different than the other player. It creates some really interesting, intense moments.

For instance, there may be a moment when Carver is suffering a bit of dementia, and player one, Isaac, needs to protect him. So when you’re playing with your friend online you may be saying, “Hey, man, what are you doing? Help me out here!” But player 2 will say, “What are you talking about? I’m fighting these crazy necromorphs!” But player 1 can’t see them because player 2 is having a dementia moment.

So it not only creates this tension on the sticks, but also makes the players share a moment of tension as they try to figure out what’s going on, what’s real and what’s not real. What the characters are experiencing in the game, the players are experiencing in real life.

It’s very different and feels very authentic. It delivers on our psychological component of the game. The dementia in Dead Space has always been a very important part of it, as you brought up earlier. Our co-op really leans into that.

PA: Part of the franchise’s appeal, at least for serious sci-fi fans, has always been its stark beauty. I’m not just talking about the sweeping space vistas seen from ship windows, but also its relatively authentic depiction of silent zero-atmosphere environments and realistic movement in zero-G environments. Have you found any new ways to make science fact meet science fiction in similarly satisfying fashion?

SP: Hmm. We’ve always tried to keep Dead Space in a place where the technology and the universe feel plausible. There’s definitely a feeling of relatability. You could imagine things in the future being the way you see them in Dead Space.

Recently in the news you may have seen a lot of articles about attempts to find alternate resources throughout the universe, which is kind of akin to our concept of planet cracking. So there are definitely some similarities between the real world and what we do in Dead Space.

But in terms of us focusing on that as a key component of the game, we have a saying on the team: Don’t let science stand in the way of awesome. Instead of limiting a cool idea because it’s not scientifically possible, we allow ourselves to bend the rules. It’s important for us to remember we’re creating a game, and we want to create the most fun experience possible.

PA: Dead Space is now three games deep. How do you keep the series’ strategic dismemberment mechanic fresh?

SP: We need to maintain strategic dismemberment. It’s been a cornerstone of the franchise. The way we keep it fresh and interesting is by introducing new enemies.

In Dead Space 3 we’ve created a new enemy called a “waster.” Depending on which extremities you shoot off it will morph into a different enemy. If you shoot off his legs, it will become a crawling enemy that can fire projectiles at you and move around on the ground at a quick pace. If you shoot off its upper extremities it will sprout these tentacles that will whip around in a really devastating manner. That’s one way we keep strategic dismemberment fresh.

Another is with the introduction of human enemies. When you defeat them — and you can defeat them in a normal way as you would a human enemy in a variety of other games — there’s a chance one of our “swarm infectors” may reanimate them. So once you’ve defeated a human enemy you have to dismember them so they don’t come back as necromorphs.

PA:I have to say, as much as I enjoy these games, I thought the baby mutants we’ve encountered in the past were a bit much. How do you know when to put the brakes on? Is there anything that might be, in your eyes, off limits, or just plain bad taste?

SP: When we set out to create something in the Dead Space games we do it with the intention of creating something relatable, something that will resonate with players. We don’t sit down and try to figure out ways to gross somebody out, or ways to really disturb people. That’s a side effect.

When you talk about the babies — the “lurkers” — from the first Dead Space, for instance, they were in the game because there was a nursery on the ship. In the future they were creating babies as people do today, in a lab, and they became infected. That was why we had them. In Dead Space 2, there was a school and there were kids of all ages living on The Sprawl. So when you encountered them [in mutated necromorph form], it only made sense. That was our motivation. It just felt like it would be odd not to acknowledge the fact that there were schools and different types of people on The Sprawl.

In terms of filtering ourselves, we haven’t gotten to a point with the franchise where we’ve found something so completely over-the-top or offensive or gratuitous that we didn’t want to have it in the game. We aren’t looking for shock factors, we’re looking for things that resonate and make sense within the context of our story and universe.

PA: Fair enough. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us. And good luck with the game’s launch. It’s just a couple of weeks away now, huh?

SP: Yes, it’s getting close. I’m getting anxious to see what everyone thinks of all the great stuff our team’s done.

Almost Done!

Postmedia wants to improve your reading experience as well as share the best deals and promotions from our advertisers with you. The information below will be used to optimize the content and make ads across the network more relevant to you. You can always change the information you share with us by editing your profile.

By clicking "Create Account", I hearby grant permission to Postmedia to use my account information to create my account.

I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.

Postmedia wants to improve your reading experience as well as share the best deals and promotions from our advertisers with you. The information below will be used to optimize the content and make ads across the network more relevant to you. You can always change the information you share with us by editing your profile.

By clicking "Create Account", I hearby grant permission to Postmedia to use my account information to create my account.

I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.